How a global software company used PCQ to surface execution risk and accelerate action planning

Note: To respect the customer’s confidentiality, this story has been anonymized at the customer’s request. The company and spokesperson are not named, but the story and results have not been altered.

AI is changing more than what companies build. It's changing how teams collaborate, make decisions, and get work done. For a 1,700 person global software company already deep into that shift, it raised a basic question: did its culture give people the confidence and clarity to actually deliver through the change, or just the willingness to go along with it?

The company wasn't short on data. It had run a mature employee-listening program with Culture Amp for over three years, and people were used to being asked what they thought. The Head of Employee Performance and Experience and the broader People team needed a sharper way to connect what employees were saying to performance, talent risk, and the business priorities shaping the next phase of the company's AI transformation.

Culture Amp's Performance Culture Quadrant™ (PCQ) gave them a stronger way to answer that question. PCQ connects Workplace Engagement with Performance Confidence, showing whether people feel engaged and believe the organization is ready to execute its strategy, and where leaders can take targeted action.

More than a diagnostic, PCQ generated actionable data and insight that helped leaders identify where performance was at risk and take targeted action to sustain or rescue it. Instead of asking leaders to interpret employee feedback as sentiment alone, it showed whether employee commitment was translating into confidence in the company’s success, where doubt or misalignment could start to slow execution, and what leaders needed to address to keep transformation efforts moving.

Challenge: Understanding whether culture could support execution through AI transformation

When the company introduced PCQ, it already had a strong employee-listening foundation with Culture Amp. Employees cared deeply about culture, performance, and the role employee experience played in business outcomes.

Engagement scores were not the problem. Treating them as the answer was.

As the organization moved deeper into its AI transformation, leaders were no longer just asking how employees felt. Broader shifts across the business were raising real questions about confidence, communication, and whether teams had what they needed to deliver on ambitious new goals.

At the same time, the organization was transforming its performance approach to help people thrive through ambiguity, changing goals, and unclear direction. It focussed on giving managers autonomy through regular, actionable insights to help their teams orientate themselves, commit to priorities, deliver and drive impact.

That made the challenge business-critical. The People team needed a more business-relevant way to see where confidence was weakening, where skepticism was building, and which teams and cohorts needed the most attention. Without that visibility, leaders risked moving through a major transformation without understanding where misalignment could slow execution, strain retention, or put critical talent at risk.

For the Head of Employee Performance and Experience, this was also the point where traditional engagement reporting started to feel too limited. 

They explained, “At some point, you end up having the same conversation about engagement scores and feedback at the expense of focusing on the impact the score was having on the business. A broad engagement score was no longer enough.”

Solution: Diagnosing the performance culture to protect critical talent

The company addressed this by launching the Performance Culture Quadrant™ as part of its broader listening and performance strategy, using it to answer a more strategic question than a typical survey readout could address: where was the culture helping the business execute, where was it starting to put critical talent and transformation efforts at risk, and where could targeted action sustain or rescue performance?

By fully integrating listening and performance into one strategy, the People team could help leaders not only navigate the AI transformation, but drive high performance throughout it by understanding risks and opportunities early on.

The organization also used PCQ to focus more deliberately on the cohorts that mattered most, including key talent and critical roles. This gave leaders a way to look beyond company-wide averages and understand whether the people most important to execution could see how the strategy applied to them and whether they believed they could succeed within it. 

Rather than adding another HR framework to the mix, the organization used PCQ to give leaders a clearer picture of where it was ready to deliver through change and where stronger support, communication, or intervention might be needed.

That made the framework immediately relevant to executive leaders trying to navigate transformation without losing momentum.

Embedding PCQ into existing leadership and talent conversations

To make the framework useful from the start, the People team built PCQ into existing leadership and talent rhythms rather than launching it as a separate HR initiative.

The team integrated the diagnostic into the performance cycle, used it in results sessions with leaders, and reviewed findings through business-relevant lenses such as division, performance rating, and key employee populations.

That decision made the framework actionable from day one. Instead of discussing culture in the abstract, leaders could use the results to understand where execution looked strong, where pressure was starting to show, and which groups needed faster attention.

PCQ became part of a simple quarterly rhythm: one report focused on performance profiles, with clear actions attached to each profile. The People team facilitated functional leadership team conversations, adapting the language to the specific leadership problems each function was facing. 

PCQ also gave leaders a simpler, more intuitive way to talk about organizational health. Rather than relying on a single engagement score, they could see where teams sat across workplace engagement and performance confidence, and what that meant for execution risk.

That clarity helped the framework land with stakeholders across the business.

“Our key stakeholders found PCQ intuitive and easy to engage with. The messaging made it accessible without requiring leaders to get tangled up in the research behind it.”  — Head of Employee Performance and Experience at a global software company

Using early visibility and People Science to speed action planning

The company also made the process more practical by making survey data visible early and consistently.

Rather than waiting for a final readout, managers and leaders could start engaging with emerging themes while the pulse was still live, giving them time to process what they were seeing and begin thinking about action planning before the cycle had even closed.

The goal was to move from insight to response more quickly, especially in parts of the business where confidence or readiness could have a direct impact on transformation efforts.

With support from Culture Amp’s People Science team, a trusted advisory partner that helped interpret the data and connect it to business priorities, the organization used the framework to analyze results across multiple lenses.

Instead of stopping at the organizational average, the team explored how results varied across divisions and demographic groups so leaders could see that the organization did not have one single culture state. It had multiple subcultures, each with different strengths and risks. 

In practice, that meant results presentations were ready within a few hours, and the specificity of the framework made it easier to identify key groups and begin building actions immediately.

That combination of earlier visibility and more precise interpretation helped leaders focus sooner on the teams, signals, and talent risks that mattered most, rather than waiting for a final report and reacting only at the company-average level.

Revealing where confidence gaps were putting execution at risk

Once PCQ was live, the picture became much sharper. The most important insight was not that employees were disengaged. With a 74% overall company engagement score, employees were broadly committed to their work and to the organization, but the data also revealed pockets where people were less certain about its future direction and ability to execute on its priorities.

That nuance helped explain why some groups were showing signs of Engaged Skepticism. 

The findings also challenged assumptions about which groups were closest to Peak Performance. Some high performers and key talent were further from Peak Performance than other groups, showing that commitment to the work did not necessarily mean confidence in the organization’s direction or operating environment. That finding prompted significant action and made the case for a more targeted performance response.

For the leadership team, that was a more useful strategic diagnosis than a high engagement score alone could offer, because it explained why a workforce full of committed employees could still be vulnerable during a period of transformation.

The results also created more productive leadership conversations. In one executive session, the leadership team reviewed how some groups were already closer to Peak Performance while others were showing more skeptical or strained patterns, giving them a more credible basis for prioritization than a company-wide average could provide. 

The team also analyzed comments from different groups through the PCQ lens and brought the findings to leaders as focused talking points. 

Focusing the action plan on the right problem

Because the diagnostic showed that the bigger issue was not motivation but confidence, Culture Amp recommended anchoring the action plan to performance confidence rather than defaulting to broad engagement themes.

The work also supported a broader shift in the performance approach, helping the organization go deeper on what people needed to perform through AI-related change and giving managers more clarity about how to support their teams.

That shift helped move the conversation away from morale-building and toward the leadership fundamentals most likely to influence execution: clearer ownership, stronger communication, better decision clarity, and greater confidence in how strategy would be delivered.

“PCQ shifted the conversation from ‘how do we fix engagement’ to ‘how do we get to a Peak Performance Culture.’ That shift has been powerful, creating stronger focus and engagement among leaders.” — Head of Employee Performance and Experience at a global software company

Just as importantly, that reframing made the work easier to discuss with leaders who may not have responded as strongly to more traditional HR language.

The quadrant gave the organization a common vocabulary for talking about risk, readiness, and what high performance would require in practice.

Using AI Coach to make HR the facilitator, not the bottleneck

Once leaders had a clearer picture of where the organization was aligned and where doubt was beginning to surface, the critical next step was turning those insights into action.

AI Coach helped make the next step easier and more scalable.

Because AI Coach sat within Culture Amp and already had the survey context built in, it gave managers a more relevant way to work through results than a general-purpose AI tool.

As leaders and managers began working through the results, AI Coach gave them a way to engage with the data in the moment, helping them interpret what they were seeing, explore follow-up questions, and identify next steps without waiting for every answer to come through HR or a facilitated workshop.

That mattered because it reduced friction between insight and action.

Instead of relying on the People team to mediate every interpretation, leaders could start working through the results more confidently on their own, keeping momentum high after the initial readout.

In practice, the approach helped shift action planning from being primarily HR-led to more HR-facilitated, with the potential to save the People team a few days of work.

“The team’s experience with the AI Coach has been really positive. A key use case for me has been using it to help build results sessions, draft communications and send out subsequent surveys together.” — Head of Employee Performance and Experience at a global software company

Results: sharper leadership focus and more targeted action

Thanks to PCQ, the organization had more than a new framework. It had a way to generate actionable insight, focus leaders on the teams and signals that mattered most, and move more quickly from insight to targeted action that could sustain or rescue performance.

With the new framework in place, the organization was able to:

• Improve voluntary turnover among key talent, with voluntary attrition dropping from 29% to 13%, in part because PCQ helped make key talent a more consistent focus in internal conversations and decisions.

• Save ~20 hours per quarter of the People team’s time across analysis, insight delivery, and co-creating actions with leaders.

• Prepare results presentations within a few hours, making it easier to move from survey readout to executive discussion and leader action planning.

• Put key talent at the center of broader talent planning, including the creation of more than 250 succession plans and four function-level key-talent development programs involving approximately 60 people.

• Shift HR and HR business partners from primarily reporting data to helping leaders interpret results and build more localized, higher-quality actions.

A more strategic role for culture during change

For this global software company, the real power of the Performance Culture Quadrant (PCQ) was not that it replaced engagement.

It was that it gave employee engagement a clearer business context.

By helping leaders see where commitment was strong but confidence was less certain, and where targeted intervention could sustain or rescue performance, PCQ gave the organization a more practical way to connect employee listening to business execution during a period of significant change.

It also gave the People team a stronger position with cross-functional leadership. Instead of being limited to reporting what employees said, they could help the business understand what the data meant for execution, what needed protecting, and where action would have the greatest impact, including in critical roles and key talent groups where confidence mattered most for continuity and team performance over time.

That shift mattered beyond this one initiative. It changed the kind of conversation the People team could have with the business, from reporting sentiment after the fact to shaping decisions about where to act before performance slipped.

The work also gave leaders a business-focused way to discuss why performance culture mattered. Culture Amp research connecting Peak Performance with broader business outcomes became a useful lever for engaging leaders and framing conversations about workforce decisions.

“The Performance Culture Quadrant has dramatically accelerated how quickly we’re able to work through business-critical topics and have the right conversations.”— Head of Employee Performance and Experience at a global software company